Why did the Central Powers lose WW1
Before you Read:
- Which states were part of the “Central Powers?” Which states fought against them?
- World War One happened during which years?
As you read:
- Summarize each section.
- What problems faced the Central Powers?
- How did they try to fix those problems?
- How successful were those solutions?
After you read:
- Do you think it is possible the Central Powers could have won the war? Why or why not?
Overview
The root cause of the Central Powers’ defeat during the war is actually quite simple. The central powers were dramatically outnumbered. Even at the beginning of the war, the Central Powers could field only 3 troops to the Allied Powers 5 troops. This only grew worse as the war drew on and stats such as Italy, Portugal, Romania, and the United States entered the war on the side of the allies.
By the end of the war, the Allied Powers had mobilized somewhere in the vicinity of 41 million soldiers compared to the Central Powers 25 million (many of those being very deep reserves from Germany—which basically mobilized its entire young male population). Even more stark is the populations from which each group could draw. The Allied powers could draw from a total population base of around 1.27 billion—compared to the Central Powers population base of 156 million. In industrial output, the Central Powers were also outnumbered. The Allies’ gross domestic product in 1913 was 1.7 trillion. The Central Powers was 0.38 trillion.
However, numbers alone do not entirely explain the war. The Allies had a huge population and industry and military compared to the Central Powers—but that population was mostly not in Europe—where almost all of the major fighting would take place. That meant that the Central Powers could have won the war if they won before the Allies could bring their imperial forces to Europe and before America joined the war.
The War of Attrition
Germany recognized this problem 10 years before the war occurred. Her general staff calculated that—in the even that Britain joined France and Russia—the Central Powers would be outnumbered 3 to 5. That meant if the war became a “war of attrition” then Germany would certainly lose.
What is a war of attrition? It is a kind of war in which the chief objective is to exhaust the enemy’s ability to fight to bleeding their population and draining their industrial capabilities. In these conflicts, your army doesn’t matter as much as your population and your industry. As you saw above, The Central Powers were at a huge disadvantage when it came to those things.
Therefore, it was Germany’s plan to win the war as quickly as possible and in such a way that the German army’s superior training, equipment, and mobility could be used to decisively defeat the enemy before Germany’s lesser population became a factor.
This is why the Schlieffen Plan was so bold and why it ignored Belgian neutrality. Germany could not afford to have a plan that was cautious. If the initial attack failed—the belief among German High Command was that Germany would lose the war. The French, on the other hand, knew that they would have a considerable numbers advantage. France, therefore, did not need to have as bold of a plan. The French could afford to do stupid things like Plan 17 because if the war became a war of attrition, France knew it would probably win.
For the first month of the war—Germany’s superior planning and superior army was winning. However when Germany failed to achieve victory and became bogged down in trench warfare—the writing was on the wall. By the end of 1914, everyone had realized that this had become a war of attrition.
Terrible Allies
At the beginning of the war, Germany was probably the strongest state in the world. Germany had the largest, best trained, best equipped army. Germany also had the second largest economy after America and the second largest fleet after Britain. The same could not be said of Germany’s allies.
By the end of the war, Germany would have 3 allies. The two “great powers” that would ally with Germany were the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empire. Bulgaria—a young, relatively small state—would also join Germany. By the end of the war, Germany relied on Bulgaria far more than the two “great powers” which says something for how weak those two allies were.
The Ottoman Empire was crumbling in 1914. It had been crumbling since the 1650s and simply refused to die. Other Europeans mockingly referred to it as “the sick old man of Europe.” Because of this, Germany never expected much of the Ottomans and the Ottomans delivered as expected—not very much. Mostly the Ottoman Empire served as a distraction as Britain and France spent much of the war carving up the Ottoman Empire, which would finally cease to exist after the war. That said, the Ottomans actually performed slightly better than anticipated. When the Allied Powers tried to knock the Ottomans out in 1915 with a massive naval invasion on the Gallipoli Peninsula—the Ottomans held out. The allies would suffer massive casualties over an 8 month conflict (300,000 casualties out of 490,000 soldiers) and eventually retreat.
However, Germany expected much more out of its other ally, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They probably shouldn’t have. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was also falling apart; torn in every direction by the many nations residing within its border that yearned for independence. The Austro-Hungarian Army was composed of people from these many backgrounds and ethnic tensions were extremely common—as well as misunderstandings for many of the soldiers were not native speakers of German, the language of the army. Even worse, the Austro-Hungarian army was miserably equipped and trained. In 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was spending less on its army than was the British Empire—despite the fact that the Austro-Hungarian Empire had an army 10x the size of the British army. It was not efficiency but neglect that brought that number so low.
The Austro-Hungarian army performed horribly in the war. Whenever Germany drew forces from the East to the West to try and fight France and Britain, The Russians would suddenly make huge gains against the hapless Austro-Hungarians and Germany would have to come running back to save the day yet again. The Austro-Hungarian Army almost collapsed twice during the war: the first during the brutal Brusilov Offensive in 1916, in which 2 million soldiers died, and the second in 1917 from simple frustration over the war. The Austro-Hungarian army could not even defeat Serbia, which had 1/8 the population of Austro-Hungary until Bulgaria joined the war and hit the Serbs from behind.
In the words of Erich von Ludendorff, one of Germany’s ablest generals: “it is like we are shackled to a corpse.”
Blockade
Germany had spent the last 10 years building up its fleet before the war. However, in 1914, Britain still ruled the seas. Britain, with the eventual help of the United States, blockaded Germany from the sea. This was a massive problem for the Central Powers, who barely grew enough food to feed themselves normally—let alone during wartime.
Germany tried to break the blockade in 2 ways. The first was during the only major naval battle of the war—called the Battle of Jutland by the allies and the Battle of the Skagerrak by Germany. In it, the great surface fleets of Britain and Germany duked it out in the largest single conventional naval battle in history. It has been called the only day in which either side could have won the war. Had Germany won, the British Blockade would have ended and Germany could have gathered much needed supplies and cut off Britain’s ability to supply its armies in France. Had Britain won, Britain could have sailed up to the German coast and forced Germany to defend yet another war front. However, after one day, both sides gave up a draw and the German fleet never again left port.
The other way was with submarines, which the Germans used to try to counter-blockade Britain—looting any ships headed for Britain and sinking any carrying weapons. However, the Germans never really had enough submarines to accomplish this impressive feat and German attacks and American shipping vessels really only served to make enemies with America.
By 1917, Germany and Austro-Hungary were starving. Their forces were down to their very last legs—reinforced by 17 year olds and 50 year olds. Their people were weary of a war that seemed to have no end in sight. When Russia collapsed in 1917 and surrendered, it gave the Central Powers just enough of a boost to make it through 1917. However, when the German Spring Offensive of 1918 failed to defeat France and America’s millions began to enter the battle lines, the fight just left the Central Powers. Austro-Hungary collapsed—torn into a half dozen different states. Germany was rocked by revolution and the new liberal-socialist government made peace their first priority.
The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires ceased to exist. Germany was forced into a horrible, humiliating peace treaty which would lay the foundation for Hitler’s eventual rise to power and the beginning of the Second World War—which would start only 21 years after the end of the First World War.